What’s a George Orwell-loving agency nurse with a low credit rating to do when he’s between contracts and urgently needs £10,000?
Meet Harley, who’s shortly to take a lucrative six-month nursing contract in a private hospital in Saudi Arabia. The trouble is, he wants to rent out his flat while he’s away, and he’s just hit a big problem. The flat is in a great location – a quiet, low-traffic street minutes from the railway station and just half an hour from the local hospital where Harley has worked for the last four years on a series of successive contracts. He knows there’ll be nurses and young doctors who would grab the chance to rent it, but not in its current state. It’s a little “tired” and is in need of a facelift.
To bring it up to letting standards – and attract the kind of responsible, professional tenant he has in mind – he needs to upgrade the antiquated boiler and central heating system, spruce up the kitchen and replace some geriatric appliances with new ones. That, he estimates, is going to cost him not far south of £10,000 – money he knows he’ll be able to repay fast should he get a loan, because he’ll be making £4,000 a month in his Saudi job.
Harley’s got a couple of months to upgrade his flat (if the work takes longer, his sister has agreed to oversee it while he sets off for Saudi), but his experience of loans is that they can take weeks to process.
Googling “fast loans” draws his attention to alternative finance businesses, notably peer-to-peer lender platforms. At first, his spirits rise in jubilation – these tech-powered platforms can process borrowing applications within days, not weeks. It's just the ticket, except for one point: on taking a closer look at their websites, all of the platforms require impeccable credit ratings.
If Harley looks a little further, though, he’ll find the ideal solution for his borrowing needs: a low-interest secured asset loan from p2p lender Unbolted. This type of loan never requires intrusive (and potentially damaging) credit searches, because creditworthiness is totally irrelevant to the platform’s pool of lenders. Uniquely, Unbolted collateralises high-value possessions (assets) owned by applicants as security for its loans.
Harley – an avid bibliophile with a special love of the works of George Orwell – certainly has such an asset: an exceedingly scarce first-edition, first-impression trade issue (with dust jacket) of Orwell’s classic The Road To Wigan Pier, published in London by Gollancz in 1937. In other words, he already has all the money he needs for his flat upgrade locked up in the form of Orwell’s book.
Given that this exceptionally rare dust-jacketed first edition is in excellent condition, Harley can upload an image of it to the Unbolted website. Our expert valuation partners Lyon and Turnbull and Fellows, both of which have dedicated teams of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Map specialists, can then determine its secondary market value, which is around £15,000.
As Unbolted lends 70 percent of an asset’s secondary market value, we could give Harley an indicative offer of a loan within hours of receiving the image and release £10,500 into his account the following day, once he places the book with us for safekeeping for the six-month duration of the loan. We won’t penalise him if he chooses to settle earlier than that on the back of his high earnings in Saudi.
Source: http://www.peterharrington.co.uk/rare-books/catalogue-104-christmas-2014/the-road-to-wigan-pier-17/
